Is Facebook eating Google’s Lunch?

Posted on 18. Aug, 2010 by Garry in Blog, Opinion, social media

Let’s face it, how many people do you know under the age of 40 who don’t use Facebook. Personally I know one and that’s because he’s concerned about online privacy. With the recent changes in privacy settings users are now able to lock their accounts down, so this issue is addressed. Will he be using Facebook now? Yes, because if he doesn’t he will have no idea what anybody is doing with their lives, when they are going out, what happened and the pictures to prove it!

top 10 sectors by Share of US Internet Usage june 2010 Neilsen

The recent drive towards social media integration with ‘add this’ and ‘Facebook’s ‘like this’ function means social recommendation is growing rapidly and could mean people will start to shy away from search. – i.e., Google and instead rely on a friend /social bookmark list within facebook as the start of the journey?
The latest stats seem to support this trend. Neilsen (June 2010) shows a 43% increase in social media site usage as a percentage of online time.. The losers include a large proportion of email and instant messaging which makes sense as why would you use these if you are using Facebook to do the same thing.?

It’s clear Facebook usage is increasing dramatically – a captive audience that is a marketing managers dream. With the advanced segmentation capabilities offered by Facebook targeting the all important 35 year old woman living in London has never been so easy.
If you look at Google, its strength is also its weakness. As a brand I want to hit a particular demographic but as a searcher on Google I choose to search for what I am interested in. If this doesn’t happen to be the brand then I am unlikely to engage with it. Meanwhile on Facebook I could be engaging with a competitor’s brand.

At this time it’s too early to really tell if spend on Google is being cannibalised by Facebook. Certainly Google’s reports to the city show no sign off this. Google’s growth area has been within the small business marketplace.

A year is a long time in online, I suspect that both Google and Facebook will live together, maybe not in wedded bliss but I don’t see advertisers abandoning one for the other Yes Facebook is often ‘cheaper’ than Google but prices will no doubt increase as more advertisers join in,
So is Facebook eating Google’s lunch? Not yet but its certainly stealing the odd nimble from the edge of its plate!

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Anyone looking for a new door, check the reviews!!

Posted on 14. Jan, 2010 by Garry in Blog, social media

Word of mouth marketing has been the stock in trade of local builders since, well, probably since anyone started building anything.

Inevitably you end up asking your neighbours who built their extension, and if they’re happy with it, you ask the builder to do the same for you, only maybe slightly bigger.

We’ve been renovating a property recently and went down that time honoured road and our builder is brilliant. They say 70% of people trust in word of mouth compared to just 15% for advertising and with the large sums building works suck up, you need trust and lots of it.

Our builder doesn’t have a website, he doesn’t need one, he’s kind of off-line local social in new media terms but building products, now that’s another business. You might ask your neighbour where they got their materials from but you’ll certainly shop around to find the best price.

And so we arrived on the Wickes website looking for a new front door. New front doors are important and they can cost a lot and frankly Wickes, isn’t the first place we’d look. But through the magic that is Google we arrived at some handsome traditional doors, more expensive than you’d expect to see at Wickes but extremely good value compared to door specialist’s prices.

The doors came with customer reviews, which were all very favourable which made up for the absence of a reputation for good front doors, we suspected we might be getting a bargain and bought. And we weren’t disappointed.

The moral for brands on the web is if you’re confident enough in your products and services to allow customer reviews you can actually widen your product offering and sell things your brand is not traditionally known for.

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